Motivational Quotes

Art

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

- Motherwell, Robert

Best Quotes about Art

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

10.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

11.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

12.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

13.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

14.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

15.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

16.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

17.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

18.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

19.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

20.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

21.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

22.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

23.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

24.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

27.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

28.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

29.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

30.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

31.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

32.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

33.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

34.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

35.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

36.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

37.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

38.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

39.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

40.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

41.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

42.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

43.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

44.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

45.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

46.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

47.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

48.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

49.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

50.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von